1. Field
The present disclosure generally relates to electronic communication. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to tailored electronic communication.
2. Background
Merchants are often hampered in their marketing efforts by a variety of factors. For instance, consumers are commonly asked to provide a variety of personal information to any merchant with whom they wish to transact (e.g., from whom they wish to receive an offer and/or make a purchase). Such a personal information request may, for example, discourage consumers from dealing with vaguely known or unknown merchants. When consumers elect, in certain circumstances, not to provide personal information to merchants, merchants are typically unable to provide tailored or customized services to these consumers. Thus, for example, merchants with little information about potential customers may conduct inefficient and poorly targeted marketing campaigns.
Moreover, although merchants may capture personal information (e.g., email addresses, phone numbers, etc.), very often, merchants are unable, even with this information, to develop a complete picture of a consumer's preferences. For example, merchants are often unable (even with consumer personal information) to establish preferences like “do not disturb” and/or a preference to receive a certain type of offer and/or a preference not to receive a certain offer or type of offer.
Similarly, although merchants may at times capture some personal information (e.g., email address, name, etc.), it is often difficult for merchants to collect much additional information, for example, information sufficient to develop one or more consumer preferences, because attempts to request additional customer information may overly hamper the checkout process—i.e., consumers may simply find it cumbersome to provide significant amounts of information during checkout.
In addition, as merchants attempt to collect information about their customers, very often this information is regarded as proprietary. Thus, the customer preference data merchants do collect is typically maintained independently by a variety of merchants. Merchants are therefore often unable (even with certain information) to completely understand the preferences of their customers, while consumers are in effect refused (by virtue of the fractured and incomplete picture merchants often have of their preferences) access to relevant and desirable content.
Further, although merchants are able to collect certain information about their customers (e.g., a merchant may collect a name of a customer who makes a purchase at the merchant and the last 4 digits of the customer's transaction account number), typically, the data collected by merchants about their customers is not useful to those merchants. For example, although a merchant may collect a customer's name, transaction account number, dates associated with purchases, and/or purchasing preferences (e.g., a restaurant may know that a customer visits every Monday and orders the same dish from the menu), this information may nevertheless be of little use to the merchant, as the merchant may be unable to communicate with the customer (e.g., although the merchant may know that the customer visits on Monday evenings, it is unlikely that the merchant will know that the customer has actually entered its premises to make a purchase). Thus, the data that merchants are able to collect is often put to little or no use.
Thus, what is needed is a system in which consumers may confidently and safely receive tailored and relevant content, and in which merchants may leverage the personal preferences of consumers to more accurately target and tailor content to those consumers. Further, what is needed is a system in which merchants are provided general, nonspecific, and/or aggregate data about consumers. For example, a system in which merchants receive an age range associated with one or more consumers (as opposed to an exact age associated with those consumers) is needed. In other words, what is needed is a system in which merchants receive profile characteristics or data, but in which the data is aggregate or summary data, as opposed to consumer specific. Thus, a consumer's privacy may be preserved, while merchants are sufficiently equipped to offer tailored, relevant content based upon the user's aggregate profile characteristics.